The Cynical Christian

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The Template for Tragedy

If anything has come from the recent rash of mass shootings in America, we’ve learned the pattern that these events usually follow:

1) Mass shooting happens.

2) Reporters kick aside whatever back-bench politician or minor Kardashian they’re talking to at the time and descend on the site of the shooting like a Biblical plague. Immediately they begin disseminating speculation and conjecture as fact.

3) The dust settles, and the shooter is correctly identified as an insane person with no political connections or motivations whatsoever. The media shifts gears to start blaming the shooting on the climate of violence created by angry conservatives. Also, guns are evil.

4) More and more information about the shooter surfaces, and we learn that he has a long history of craziness that is well known to the people around him. We hear of instance after instance where he behaved in a way that was a big, blinking, beeping, flashing warning sign of someone who is a danger to himself and others. And yet nobody did anything.

The media continue to assure us that guns are the problem.

5) Ecstatic politicians rush forward to re-introduce their favorite terrible gun-control legislation ideas. Media coverage reveals that neither the media nor the politicians know the first thing about guns, constitutional rights, or popular opinion. They will frequently use the term “assault rifle,” but the closest they could come to defining the term is, “Y’know, like that gun Bruce Willis used that one time.”